


Let the Children be Children

by orphan_account



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen, Sadstuck, an analysis on dirk and roxy's relationships with their guardians, dirk has depression and anxiety, doing her roselike mindgames, goes around my headcanon that dave and rose were the opposites of bro and mom in terms of guardians, he doesn't know it though, it probably borders on abusive, rose might be abusive i dont know, roxy's alcohol problems, sort of, yeah it's mostly sadstuck
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-12-04
Updated: 2014-12-06
Packaged: 2018-02-28 03:41:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,899
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2717540
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He knows that what little he does is approved, because why would he deserve affection otherwise?</p><p>She stares at the piled aspirin in her cabinet, and wonders when she'll get the nerve to scream, "TALK TO ME."</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Your name is Dirk Strider, and you are positive your bro is the most ironic thing since My Little Pony crossed with a walking cabbage that took a wrong turn at Albuquerque for no apparent reason. Granted, at times you think his behavior is completely unironic, however the thoughts are quickly put out of your mind, for your bro is simply the coolest there is. Not that you’d ever tell him that. No, you’d rather leave vague messages written all over your goddamn house, stating in diaphanous and nebulous declarations of your bro’s complete chill ways and ironic complexities of living. You think you may have it figured out by now. Your viewings of SBAHJ, repeated countless times on disc, have paid off for certain. You’ve typed essays, written analyses, even done legitimate scientific explorations of the intricate and complex inner workings of the ancient art of irony. Said essays are then put in the SBAHJ format, as a cherry on top of your glorious irony sunday, or perhaps the rainbow sprinkles to your scrumptious ice cream swirl of spiderweb like blends in said ice cream, intertwined to make the perfect flavor of the ultimate definition to irony. You send these to your bro in ambiguously documented files on his computer, and though he never takes you up on it, your are completely positive he has read them, and is inwardly praising your analytical skills like none other. 

This is certain, because there is literally no other reason that he’d gently ruffle your hair when he passes by, nor could there be any reason that he ditches most of his interviews while stating he’d rather not fall into the quote unquote “slippery slope of asshole directors that never spend any time with their goddamn relatives”. You can’t find any possible accumulation of evidence that he would bring you along to his museum that houses his bizarre, yet charmingly ironic old movie sets and props, for any other reason to hint at you that you’re doing well in your research, you’re heading towards the path of perfecting the art of irony. It’s in these times where you’ll occasionally break your infamous poker face around Cal, break out in a tiny grin at the thought of succeeding, and climbing the ropes until you’re on your bro’s level. Of course, you recognize the flaws. Of course you do, there’s always flaws in some methods, and you’re positive your bro knows them too, hence why he encourages you so. He wants you healthy and alert for your cognitive skills (“jesus dicks how long has it been since youve eaten”), trains you vigorously for your adulthood (“seriously dude get your nap on how long have you even been at this”) by way of ironically pacing yourself. Your robotics projects take up quite a bit of your time as well, and there must be some method of meeting up to his standards as well, considering that he’s always getting you new equipment, buying you tutorial programs and accommodating for your new projects. He even bought you an entire new apartment next to yours, just so you had sufficient space to work on your Brobot. That had to be ironic, of course, since there’s plenty of room in your room to program it, perhaps a gentle needle of he didn’t need “two of you” in the apartment. His bringing you lunch was obviously a hint that he wanted you to stay in there to work, to push yourself harder because you aren’t good enough yet. No, you need to keep advancing, getting better, because Hell knows that you are not good enough as you are now, not good enough, not enough control over your environment, yourself.

He wants you to keep a sense of control over everything. You know because it’s really the only way to get a step up in his ways, in your ways. Keeping everything working like a well oiled machine with many parts, the perfect environment for you to have no slipups, no flaws in your persona, an area where even your surroundings hold an atmosphere that says that this is you, this entire spot is in line with your motions, every twitch of your muscles meaning that something could have changed. It means that everything is expected, you can allow yourself to move fluidly with the rest of the room. When you can achieve this, it means you can finally relax, not come apart inwardly whenever you look at table salt, when your mind begins ticking, running through calculations, the chemical makeup of the salt, atoms, electrons spinning around it at unimaginable speeds, the particle wave duality theories starting to recite themselves in your head when Dave asks you whether you’re short of something, or on those days, raining and trapped inside, you stare at your puppets, and examine your stitches, alert to every flaw, every imbalance. Sometimes, you look at fire, or the microwave. The probability of it bursting out, spiraling out of control. Burning you, burning the apartment. It’s idiotic, you know it is, because you know the probability of your death the day you decide to scale the side of your apartment building, the day you ride your skateboard so close to traffic it’s insane, but you do it anyway, you do it because you love the rush. No matter how logical, how cool and controlled you want to be, there’s always that fire burning in you, urging you forward, to do things just because you can, and you think one day it will escape and burn you up from the inside. 

You want to be like your brother, the way he always handles things so calmly, how he’s obviously motivated by irony, by intricate webs in his mind that you climb towards understanding. He does the math, he is driven on by that complex net of his mind, and you know that at your core, emotion, passion drives you onward. You hate it sometimes. You hate yourself for feeling beyond what your supposed to, for molding your identity off of someone who knows more than you, has more skill. You aim to get higher that him, to perfect his art, yet you can’t do that without first completely destroying your own self, to change yourself completely from the hideous amalgamation you’ve made of yourself in your failed attempt to sculpt a persona. While he makes those little gestures that yes, you’re making progress, you catch the gestures at the corner of your eye. The slight looks at you, the nuance in his expression that you’ve picked up over the ages. Disappointment, of course. Maybe even disgust, because for all your knowledge, there’s still more you can grab onto, things that you don’t know about, and therefore can’t keep track of. It’s all a web, all a puppet show, and if you can’t hang onto the strings, move them with complete and utter cold precision, than who will? 

Sometimes, parts of you wonder if it isn’t ironic. When he gets on the couch with you, opens his arm in a subtle invitation to lean into him, he never gives you any type of look. It doesn’t look like he was issuing a challenge, that maybe he just wanted to spend some time with you while watching a movie. Still, you have enough rationality to know that it isn’t true by any stretch of the imagination. There’s always an ulterior motive for him, the message had to be that you did or he expected you to do something that would deserve this display of affection. You won’t let yourself fail. No matter how useless your persona is, no matter how badly you failed this time, there’s always some way out. You’ll try to keep going, get more knowledge, understand irony better, and someday, maybe you’ll perfect it, understand it in all its raw essence and surpass your bro. 

There isn’t any other option, any other path out of this. It was who you had to be, the puppeteer, the engineer, the writer, the philosopher. All of this was yours, because if it wasn’t, if you weren’t, you honestly aren’t sure if there’d be any good left in your existence. 

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Your name is Dave Strider, and you’re just worried about your little brother.


	2. Chapter 2

Your name is Roxy Lalonde, and your mother has stocked the cabinets with aspirin again. Perhaps, if it was a little less, or if you were more naive, you’d think it was intended out of kindness, out of concern, but no. Everything in the medicine cupboard, everything visible at first glance anyway, was aspirin, a jab from your mother about your addiction. Something that said, “Yes, I know you’re going to be drunk.” Nothing afterwards, just a simple needle from her. You tried to justify it at first, telling yourself repeatedly, maybe she was just trying not to interfere, maybe she was trying, for just this once, to show that she cared. That she just overcompensated because she knew what it was like to be an alcoholic in youth. You’d kept at it for six months, before it just became flat out obvious to you. The negligently abandoned money on the counter of your large kitchen, much too careless for a woman of her standing. The fact that it “happened” to be just enough to buy yourself liquor, tax included. The first time she did that, something inside you clenched up, and that in turn led you to take the money, to drink away the feeling of isolation that carved itself a hole inside of you and made a nest of stones in your chest, sitting heavy until your mind became clouded enough to ignore it. 

You’d tried a lot to get her attention, to fill the void that the lack of her affection left in you. The drinking had started when you’d learned from Dirk’s brother, she’d had problems with it, and the opportunity presented itself to you like the light of stars bleeding through the night sky. You weren’t a good writer, anything but, you didn’t have her discipline, nor the air of authority and dignity she carried with her, but you could have that. That one thing, no matter how minor or unhealthy, was your link to her, something you turned to and could think, yes, yes, you shared this, you could at least have some portion of her to yourself, proof that you could look to and think, “I take after my mother.” It had made you happy at first, amplified the warm feeling that the alcohol gave you, until that warmth turned sour in your gut. 

It only took a couple of months of justifying it to realize, you couldn’t stop. The thought that came into your mind when you came home from your prestigious school, that chant in the back of your head when you got slightly stressed. It was always the same. You need a drink. If anything, you weren’t stupid. Even you knew that, with your high up private school, your passion for biology, genetics, chemistry, and everything in between those. You sipped vodka from a martini glass while you wrote your long paper of bioethics, stirred it while you checked for errors in your coding. Your mother was barely home when you came home from school anyways, and even then you’re positive she wouldn’t check on you, passed out in your pile of stuffed animals and game consoles to wake up with a splitting headache. At times you actually were glad for hangovers. At least you weren’t so used to the alcohol in your system that you were able to take it without your body reacting, there still was little enough that it exited your system after a nap or two. When you stumbled into the kitchen to grab some aspirin, your mother pointedly works on a book, or knits. You tried knitting once, even sat next to your mother and very obviously looked over her shoulder. Hinting that maybe she could teach you, or offer to do so. Naturally, she did not. Maybe it was some kind of passive aggressive dare to ask her yourself, and once you did, asking whether she’d teach you. She had taught you, taught you a very difficult pattern, but you hadn’t said a word on it, just doing the best you could and imitating her movements. You used to be unaware, but now that you knew of them, you’d started to refuse to participate in whatever off mind games she played. Maybe she thought you doing that was your “passive aggressive” response. You knew that you needed to talk to her, and sometimes you had to resist the urge to scream with all you had, “WHY WON’T YOU TALK TO ME.” You didn’t have the nerve, you were afraid of the drastic change it might make in the household, of the unpredictability of her reaction. Though you think the thing that terrifies you most is the possibility that she won’t answer. She’s look at you, speaking in those odd riddles, and nothing would change. You stick to routine, just trying to get her attention in whatever way possible, trying to pick at bits of genuine affection.

She was kind, at times. She’d make your favorite meal, buy the pajamas or cloths you’d desperately wanted, or even take you out to eat. A few times, she took out a game of Monopoly, and beat you at it obviously, but it had been genuine, she had smiled and laughed gently with you. The best time is when she’d brought you several kittens with a tiny smile on her face, and placed them on your lap with no warning whatsoever while you laughed so hard you cried. She did this, and you got the vibe that she wasn’t just indulging you, she was indulging herself as well. When you thought about it good and hard while sober, you’d wondered whether she was afraid of losing you to adulthood. Perhaps she feared you sliding away into independance, leaving her alone again, childless in your mansion, the thoughts coursing through your head before you’d lost them in the cloud of liquor. One day, in the haze of alcohol, she entered the room, brushed her fingers through your hair and sung you strang lullabies until you finally fell asleep. Then you’d awoken to your bed with your mother as her old self, leaving you to wonder if it was just a dream, as usual.

After three years, sixteen years old, you’d had enough. You’d dumped what alcohol you’d “hidden” out your window, and you’d threw the bottles out after as hard as you could, your arm cramping and your fist clenching afterwards. The addiction came, it made you claw at yourself and grind your teeth until they felt like they’d push back into your gums, but you wouldn’t, couldn’t, give in. It was agonizing at times. But it wasn’t working, the alcohol no longer gave you that connection to your mother that you’d craved so when you were young. There was no point to this anymore, nothing but your addiction, and if cold turkey would kick it, you were going cold turkey.

A few weeks later, after you’d stopped getting shaking fingers, headaches, you’d cleared the cabinet of the aspirin. Most of it, anyways. A few were left, and you’d gone down to the homeless shelter you spent time in occasionally, feeding the locals. You spoke to the people you were more fond of about your mother at times and listened to their problems in return, dropping off the aspirin to the employees with a smile and heading home without too many words. It was the reaction of your mother that you wanted to see, hoping for a spark of pride in her eyes, or something of the sort. Just some kind of acknowledgement was all you wanted, all you needed.

Honestly, you weren’t sure what you expected. A mere vague note on the lack of aspirin, and nothing else. It wasn’t surprising, which might have been the most depressing thing about the entire ordeal. There was just a feeling of disappointment, a brief moment of hesitance where you wanted so badly to ask her, what about your alcoholism. What about your struggle to get off of the booze, just so that she would pay attention, so that she’d have something to be proud of. Somewhere, you know that you’re going to have to say it. You’re going to have to make her listen, to take her by the shoulders and tell her with all your might, all the strength you used to ditch your addiction, that she needed to speak to you, tell you in her own words what she wanted from you.

One day, you would. You’d steel yourself and manage it, because there wasn’t any other choice but to face it, to ask her directly. You take your console up to your room, and play the game, trying to block out the thoughts of trepidation from your mind until you had the will to face them. For now, you merely try at getting her attention, try to keep the lonely feeling in your large house away without the liquor running in your system. You’ll talk to her, one day. You have to.

\----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Your name is Rose Lalonde, and you are terrified of being abandoned.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I might continue this with Jane and Jake, I'm not sure. Does anyone have an opinion?


End file.
